Slow Decay

by Andy Lane

  ‘Tell me who you are first,’ Scotus said quietly, firmly. He had considerable charisma, Jack noticed.

  ‘Let’s just say we’re interested in anything that’s alien. Especially if it starts affecting people.’

  Scotus nodded. ‘Very well. I wasn’t always a nutritionist,’ he said. ‘I used to be a vet. I owned a place just outside Cardiff, specialising in farm animals.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you seen the way that farming is going recently? It’s enough to turn your stomach. If scientists could breed square chickens, so that you could stack more of them together in one place, then farmers would beat a path to their door. It’s all about maximising the amount of profit per cubic foot, because the supermarkets will absolutely nail the farmers to the wall with the contracts they force them to sign.’

  ‘Fascinating though this is,’ Jack said, ‘I’m still waiting for the aliens to turn up.’

  ‘I was called out to a cow that had died,’ Scotus said. ‘It had apparently been acting strangely for days; eating much more than usual, attacking the other cows and taking bites out of them, getting thinner and thinner. I thought it was BSE, but if you report that then there’s a panic which results in every cow within fifty miles being slaughtered, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. I conducted an autopsy, and I found this thing in its stomach. It was barely alive.’

  ‘Drifted through the Rift,’ Jack murmured to Gwen. She didn’t reply.

  ‘It looked like some kind of tapeworm,’ Scotus continued, ‘so I put it in a nutrient solution while I worked out what to do.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – it changed into a thing like a flying dagger and tried to impale you.’

  ‘I was out, on a call. I came back to find my dog dead and the creature gone.’ Scotus reached a hand up to his forehead, brushing the fine blond hairs away and placing his palm over his eyes. ‘I autopsied the dog, and found a cluster of these… egg-like things. I kept them for study – cutting some of them open, implanting others in rats and cats and other dogs until I had worked out their complete life cycle.’

  ‘Without bothering to inform the authorities?’

  ‘And what good would that have done? They wouldn’t have understood what an opportunity I had!’

  ‘Opportunity?’ Jack asked. ‘To do what – kill people?’

  Scotus winced. ‘That was… unfortunate,’ he said. ‘It was never meant to go that way. I thought I’d invented a way of making people slim and making me rich at the same time. Obesity is such a problem these days. People would pay a lot of money for a guaranteed way of losing weight, and I developed a toxin that would just dissolve the creatures when their hosts had reached their ideal body mass without affecting the hosts. It was perfect – my patients would never realise what was inside them! I didn’t realise that the creatures could actually influence people’s actions if they weren’t getting enough nutrition!’

  ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,’ Jack said. ‘But you’re going to turn around and walk back along that road.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Scotus said.

  Jack raised his pistol, but a muffled sound behind him made him turn.

  Gwen’s head was twisted painfully around to one side, pointing up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide and it looked like she might have been screaming, if the hand that was holding her head hadn’t been cutting off her breathing.

  The hand belonged to a man in a leather jacket, who was holding Gwen’s automatic in his other hand.

  ‘Drop the gun,’ he said, ‘or I’ll snap your girlfriend’s neck.’

  Somewhere in the distance, a gun fired.

  Owen raised his gun and aimed it at the head of the thug with the nail-encrusted chain, which looked like something barnacled and crustacean. ‘One more step and I’ll conduct a radical transsphenoidal hemisectomy using a copper-jacketed bullet rather than a scalpel,’ he said, trying to put a firmness into his voice that he didn’t really feel.

  ‘You talk too much,’ the thug said. He lashed out expertly with the chain, flicking it.

  The end of the chain sliced across Owen’s knuckles, sending fiery pain shooting up his arm. He dropped the gun. It hit the floor, butt-first, and fired, sending a plume of flame up towards the ceiling and deafening Owen with the blast.

  ‘I do everything too much,’ Owen muttered, sucking blood from his fingers.

  The recoil caused the gun to skitter across the concrete floor towards the thug. He looked at it disdainfully, and kicked it away, over the edge of the concrete floor and onto the tarmac beneath. ‘Tricky safety design on the P220,’ he said. ‘The company abandoned the traditional catch for a decocking lever that lowers the hammer to a safety notch.’ He glanced up at Owen, and there was a terrible humour in his eyes. ‘But that’s by-the-by,’ he said. ‘Now it’s fairer. We’re both unarmed.’

  ‘You’ve got that chain thing,’ Owen pointed out.

  The thug looked at the spiked chain.

  ‘Oops, my mistake,’ he said, and smiled.

  He stepped towards Owen, bringing the chain back behind him and coiling it, ready to strike.

  Owen risked a glance to one side, where Toshiko was confronting the other thug. He’d hoped she would have him on the floor with her gun in the back of his neck by now, but she seemed to be weighing up her options, deciding how to take him on. As Owen watched, Toshiko’s thug stepped forward suddenly and sliced his knuckle-dusters horizontally through the air at eye level. She brought her hands up to protect her face. The knuckle-dusters caught her palm, their brass spikes tearing the flesh and spraying blood in all directions. Toshiko staggered backwards, the gun falling from her hand and hitting the concrete floor but not, Owen noticed, firing. Perhaps he should switch to a Walther.

  Something moving in the corner of his eye made him glance up. The nailed chain was flicking towards his eyes. He instinctively put his left arm up to defend himself. The chain wrapped itself around his forearm, the nails tearing through the leather of his jacket and into his flesh. The pain caused his breath to catch in his throat and his heart to go into arrhythmia with the shock. Instinctively he wanted to pull his arm closer to his body, protecting himself, but years of fighting in bars had taught him two valuable lessons.

  Lesson one: you can ignore pain, if you really try.

  Lesson two: do what the other guy is least expecting, even if it hurts.

  Owen took two steps towards the thug. The chain sagged between them, its tension removed by Owen’s actions. The thug pulled at the chain, but instead of dragging Owen towards him, pulling him off his feet, he merely succeeded in taking some of the tension back up again. Owen took a step to one side, blood pulsing hot and wet inside his sleeve. Raising his right leg, he brought his foot down hard on the side of the thug’s knee.

  Owen felt, rather than heard, a wet snapping sound. The thug’s leg crumpled in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go. He screamed, shrill and loud.

  ‘And that’s what seven years of medical school did for me,’ Owen gasped, tugging the chain from the thug’s suddenly nerveless hand and unwrapping it carefully from his arm. ‘I know every vulnerable point on the human body, and several inside it as well.’ Stepping forward, he brought his heel down squarely on the thug’s temple. The screaming stopped.

  The inside of his sleeve was hot and wet and throbbing, but he didn’t think the damage was anything more than superficial. He turned to where Toshiko was fighting her own corner. She was backing away fast, blood dripping from her injured hand. Owen looked around for her gun. If he could retrieve that, he could even the odds somewhat.

  Before he could do anything, Toshiko reached down with her uninjured hand and pulled her leather belt out from her jeans. Still backing away, she doubled it over and moved her grasp from the metal buckle to the pointed and pierced end.

  ‘What’s this – the fashion police?’ her thug taunted.

  Toshiko flicked the belt at him the same way Owen’s thug had flicked the nailed chain at him. The
square belt buckle caught him on the bridge of his nose. Blood gushed as he stumbled backwards. His heel caught on Toshiko’s Walther and he missed a step. Toshiko flicked her belt again. The buckle hit him right between the eyes. He crumpled to the floor.

  Owen looked at Toshiko with astonishment. ‘That was awesome,’ he said.

  ‘That was Fendi,’ Toshiko replied smugly. She looked at his arm, and winced. ‘We need to get that seen to,’ she said.

  Owen indicated her ripped hand. ‘And that,’ he said.

  Toshiko looked at it as if she hadn’t noticed it before. ‘Should we get to a hospital?’ she asked hesitantly, ‘or call Ianto?’

  Owen indicated the beds lined up behind them, each with its comatose occupant. ‘They’ve all got sterile dressings on,’ he pointed out. ‘There has to be a cupboard full of medical supplies around here somewhere. And when we’ve got ourselves sorted out, we’ll go and see what’s up with Jack and Gwen. They’re probably having a really boring time, compared to us.’

  NINETEEN

  Jack let the Webley fall from his hand onto the tiled floor.

  ‘OK, big boy,’ he said to the goon who was holding Gwen’s neck, ‘you can let go now.’

  The goon twisted Gwen’s head around a little further. Jack could see her tendons standing out. Her cheeks and forehead were suffused with blood and her eyes were almost popping out of their sockets. One more turn and her neck would break.

  ‘If anything happens to my friend,’ he said calmly, ‘I will take my pistol and shove it so far up your ass that you’ll gag on it. And then I’ll reach down your throat and pull the trigger.’

  The goon kept smiling at Jack, and shook his head in mock-chastisement, but he relaxed his grip a fraction. Gwen sucked in great whooping gulps of air, her face gradually returning to its normal colour. She was still holding the bird-cage in her hand, and she shakily set it on the floor without disturbing the shroud.

  ‘Not sure where this guy fits into the scheme of things,’ Jack said, turning to Doctor Scotus. ‘Are you branching out into fitness? Hiring personal trainers?’ He eyed the goon up and down. The man obviously lifted weights every day. No need for diet pills there. ‘Cos I could do with a workout, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ve… made a deal with some of the Cardiff criminal fraternity,’ Scotus said. ‘They protect me, and carry out some small tasks, and in return I give them a cut of the profits.’

  ‘Small tasks like kidnapping your customers off the street because you can’t afford to have them running around going psychotic?’ Jack gazed at the goon, who was getting edgy at the attention he was getting. ‘I wouldn’t start counting on those profits if I were you,’ he said. ‘The bottom’s dropped out of the diet-pill market, what with all the problems with murder and cannibalism and stuff.’

  ‘Issues, just issues,’ Scotus said, rubbing his hand across his eyes. ‘The creatures are growing too fast, requiring too much nutrition. I’ve developed a hormone that will delay their growth, slow it down. It will require my patients to take another tablet every day, of course, but I will tell them that it’s just a part of the treatment. One tablet to start the treatment, a tablet every day to keep it going, and a tablet to stop. It’s simple, and effective.’

  ‘How long did it take to develop this hormone?’ Jack asked. ‘And how many people died along the way? Was your receptionist one of them?’

  Scotus grimaced. ‘Poor girl,’ he said. ‘She missed taking a tablet. Just forgot. The creature inside her reacted… badly. It escaped, and hid somewhere in the air-conditioning system, or under the floor. I had to move out of the office suite in a hurry, before it attacked anyone else.’ He shook his head. ‘It should be a fairly simple process to adjust the dosage to ensure that my customers can miss one or two tablets in a row without the creature becoming agitated.’

  ‘But you need the eggs,’ Gwen rasped, rubbing her throat. ‘You need lots of eggs if you’re going to develop an efficient business model.’ She spotted Jack’s sceptical glance, and shrugged. ‘Rhys bought a book called Fifteen Ways to be an Effective Manager,’ she said. ‘I had a flick through, one night, when I was bored.’ Turning back to Scotus, she said, ‘So where do all these eggs come from? As I understand it, a host needs to be implanted by one of those flying things, and I doubt you got more than a few dozen eggs from that dog of yours. You’re going to need thousands, even tens of thousands, if this thing takes off. What’s the secret? Where are the eggs going to come from?’

  Scotus looked away, discomfited. ‘There are… possibilities,’ he said. ‘I have identified a new source of supply.’

  ‘No.’ Jack felt a rage building within him, burning through his heart and brain. ‘This stops, here, now.’

  Scotus shook his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The potential impact of my diet pills is immense. They could literally change the world. They are the only diet pills guaranteed to make you lose weight. Not “help”. Not “assist”. Not “only in conjunction with a calorie-controlled diet”. No, if people stick to the regime, then the pills actually make them lose weight. Overnight, there’s no more obesity epidemic in the western world. The National Health Service can turn its resources away from treating heart disease and diabetes, and all the other things that obesity causes, and start working on the things that matter, like curing cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The government can redirect its resources to fighting global warming. Just one simple thing, like making people slim, and the effects are incredible. Is it so much to ask that a few people sacrifice their lives in the early stages of testing?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack said. He could feel the rage darkening his voice. ‘It is.’

  Scotus was almost pleading now. ‘But there are always risks in drug tests. Do you think that antibiotics came for free? Do you think that drugs for controlling blood pressure didn’t cause any problems during testing? Even when new drugs go into a few years of double-blind tests to check their efficacy, the people given the placebos have to suffer a continuation of their symptoms when the other people on the trial are being given a cure. Is that fair? All medical research is built on pain and death. We accept it, when we think about it at all, because the potential benefits are so great!’

  ‘There is a difference,’ Jack said, ‘between research that may have an unfortunate side effect and research that’s guaranteed to kill your test subjects.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ Gwen said. She was staring at Scotus. ‘You won’t convince him. He will keep on going, producing his pills, whatever arguments you make.’

  ‘She recognises the truth in what I’m saying,’ Scotus proclaimed. ‘She recognises the passion behind my words.’

  ‘No,’ Gwen said. ‘I recognise the fact that you’ve been infected yourself. There’s one of these creatures inside you, and it’s controlling your thoughts.’

  Halfway along the corridor, past the door they had come in by, Toshiko stopped by the first of the massive riveted metal slabs.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked Owen.

  He rushed past her. ‘Cold store,’ he said. ‘It’s where they would have kept the frozen carcasses they offloaded from the ships, before canning them and taking them away to the shops. Transport area’s back that way,’ he gestured over his shoulder, ‘so the canning area is probably up ahead.’

  ‘The power is on,’ Toshiko said simply.

  Owen stopped. ‘It can’t be. This place has been deserted since the 1970s.’

  ‘There’s a generator,’ Toshiko pointed out.

  ‘But that was set up to keep the medical monitoring equipment running, and provide lighting.’ Owen was getting irritated; Toshiko could tell from his tone of voice. He didn’t like people disagreeing with him. ‘There’s no point cooling the cold store down to some ludicrous temperature. That’s just a waste of energy,’

  ‘It would be,’ Toshiko said, ‘if there wasn’t anything in here.’ She pressed her face against the thick glass. ‘But I think there is.’


  She turned her attention to the control box by the side of the door. It had a thermostat on it, plus a couple of buttons that turned the cooling on or off. The thermostat was set at just above freezing. There was also a button that opened the door, although there was a massive handle on the door itself which would do the same in case of power failure. She guessed there was a similar handle on the inside just in case anyone became trapped.

  Owen moved alongside her. She edged to one side, careful not to brush against his arm. She had poured antiseptic over it, back in the large area where they had fought and vanquished their opponents, and then placed dressings over the area where the nails had ripped his skin and bound the whole thing up with bandages. He had then done the same with the back of her hand. Owen had left their opponents tied to two empty beds at the end of one of the rows. He had wanted to use the nail-studded chain to tie them down with, but Toshiko had vetoed the idea.

  ‘Let’s take a look inside,’ she said. She pressed the button on the box that she thought would operate the mechanism. Somewhere inside the door, something went clunk. A hydraulic system wheezed into life, pulling the door slowly open. Toshiko and Owen both stepped backwards as the door swung ponderously towards them and a cloud of freezing vapour puffed into their faces.

  As the vapour cleared, Toshiko stepped forward. She had retrieved her Walther from the floor of the medical area, and now she held it in front of her in both hands, ready to fire.

  ‘Oh hell,’ Owen said. His breath turned to white vapour as it left his mouth, condensed into water droplets by the cold that rolled towards them from the opening door. ‘Are those what I think they are?’

  ‘They look like…’ Toshiko started, and then trailed off as her thoughts caught up with her words. ‘Oh fuck,’ she said primly.